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The
2004 Award
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Nominated by:
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Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Publishers
of Nominated Editions: |
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| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in
Grosse Pointe, Michigan, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking strawberry
blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops
between them - along with Callie's failure to develop - leads Callie to
suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl
at all. The explanation for this shocking state of affairs is a rare genetic mutation - and a guilty secret - that have followed Callie's grandparents from the crumbling Ottoman Empire to Prohibition-era Detroit and beyond, outlasting the glory days of the Motor City, the race riots of 1967, and the family's second migration, into the foreign country known as suburbia. Thanks to the gene, Callie is part girl, part boy. And even though the gene's epic travels have ended, her own odyssey has only just begun. Spanning eight decades - and one unusually awkward adolescence - Jeffrey Eugenides' long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfilment of a huge talent from a writer singled out by both Granta and The New Yorker as one of America's best young novelists. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, USA, in 1960, the third son of an American-born father whose Greek parents emigrated from Asia Minor and an American mother of Anglo-Irish descent. He received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. Two years later, in 1988, he published his first short story. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, The Gettysburg Review, and Granta. His many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Harold D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the past few years he has been a Fellow of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD and of the American Academy in Berlin. Mr Eugenides now lives in Berlin, Germany, with his wife and daughter. |
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Reader
Reviews
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a bookish young man in his early 20s, an epic novel about the unique growing
pains of a 12-year-old girl in 1960s/1970s Detroit might not seem the most
obvious choice as a Christmas present. Still, I'm sure my father saw 'Pulitzer
Prize winner' onthe front cover, and 'from the author of The Virgin Suicides'
on the back, and didn't think about the purchase any further. However it got into my hands, anyway, I wasn't slow to grip onto it. Middlesex is a sweeping, fascinating epic that takes the reader from 19th century Greece to 21st century Berlin via 75 years of 20th century America, without losing the run of itself even once. The similarly-lengthy 'My Name Is Red', last year's IMPAC Dublin Award prize winner by Orhan Pamuk, plunged the reader a bit too deeply into the art of illustration in places, causing frustration and tedium. In contrast, Eugenides deftly switches from medical detail to societal history to character development to plot progression with a assured sense of timing that suggests the penmanship of a grand master novelist, and not a follow-up to a debut effort. Indeed, it is this very narrative flow that makes Middlesex an old-fashioned great yarn, despite the very modern subject matter. Eugendies has a delightful touch of phrase and eye for detail that propels the enthralled reader through the book. In short, Middlesex is a stunning tour de force that is to be recommended to anyone that likes reading at all, never mind the bizarre subject matter. A literary triumph. Bill Lehane. |
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